commitment...

so i have been seeing a new girl quite a bit since being back in town. i think we've hung out 6 times now and she digs me - aka wants to be in a (purely monogamous) relationship with me. i've been open with her from the beginning about my intentions to stay single as i have had very little opportunity to get to know the single-me (only 6 months in many many years). presently i find the prospect of commitment to be an enormous turn off! i am not entirely sure why. perhaps my experience in them. even when i was in an exclusively monogamous relationship, i found it exceedingly difficult to not think about being with other people. i wanted to still fuck and date and fuck lots of people. now that i'm single, i am finding it hard to meet girls who accept this different notion of commitment. i'm sure it's largely a product of conservative midwest values, but it bugs me to the core! there IS a significant difference between cheating and non-monogamy and i wish more people could grasp this simple notion.

it may be better expressed by mr. dan savage...

Monogamy Vs. Commitment

AC: When I told people I was interviewing you, they all said ask, “Him his thoughts on monogamy,” because that is something that comes up every now and again in your podcast. It makes visits fairly often.

DS: Well, it’s usually the problem. I don’t think everyone should be in a non-monogamous relationship. I’m not prescriptive about it. I’m in a non-monogamous relationship and that’s dangerous for a gay male couple with kids to say out loud, right? Because people assume a level of promiscuity that appalls even me. I’ve been here in Bloomington for eight weeks and I haven’t touched anybody. Not that I didn’t want to! A lot of really cute guys here in Bloomington, but that’s not the way I roll.

The problem with monogamy is we’re not any good at it. How many Elliot Spitzers, David Bitters, Bill Clintons, John Edwards… How many times do we have to watch the same story, watch the same play before we realize that it’s in the script?

Everyone, even if you’re going to be monogamous, needs to acknowledge that monogamy is not natural and it’s not easy. Love doesn’t mean that you don’t want to sleep with other people. Love means, if you make a monogamous commitment, means you will refrain from sleeping with other people. You will still wannna – and you will wanna bad – and you will both wanna. Women get away with pretending they never wanna.

We have put a lie at the heart of all of our long-term romantic relationships and then we wonder why they fall apart. Two people are looking at each other and lying to each other every day about something very important, and they both know that the other is lying every day. Then they don’t trust each other, oddly enough, after all that lying back and forth. It’s so much healthier just to acknowledge, even if you are going to make a monogamous commitment, that that is going to be an effort and there will be consequences to that. There are consequences to non-monogamy.

When the non-monogamous relationship falls apart, everyone blames non-monogamy. When a monogamous relationship falls apart, nobody blames monogamy. I have observed so many relationships that were otherwise decent that could have survived for the long haul if people had just been allowed to be off leash every once in a while – which does not mean anything goes. “You say you’re not monogamous. Oh, so that means you can sleep with anybody, anytime, anywhere?” No. No. “You’re monogamous. Do you sleep with each other anytime, anywhere that you want?” No.

Monogamy is stupid and people are bad at it. That’s what I think. It doesn’t work. We have the divorce rate to prove it. We have David Arquette and Courtney Cox now. You can’t open a magazine, you can’t leave the house without hearing about people cheating on each other. If we continue to define cheating on each other as a divorce-level, breakup-level offense, we are packing our relationships with dynamite and blowing them up over and over and over again. I think a relationship should be able to survive a routine infidelity, because infidelity is routine. We need to reconceive how we regard it. The problem is – now I’m going to rant.

AC: Go for it!

DS: For most of recorded human history, men weren’t supposed to be monogamous. It was required. They had concubines. They had whores. They had mistresses. They had more than one wife. Monogamy was really for women and all about paternal anxiety and assuaging that – enslaving women, really. It was about control. To the credit of our species, it took us however many tens of thousands of years before we realized that wasn’t egalitarian, and about 60 years ago we decided to make it fairzies.

But we made a big mistake. Rather than giving women the same latitude and freedom that men had enjoyed, we said men had to now hew to the monogamous ideal that had been imposed on women. It has been a disaster for straight people and straight relationships, and the children of straight people. Disaster.

Confrontation From Serial Monogamists

AC: What sort of backlash have you had to deal with, with those views? I’m sure stuff came your way.

DS: Oh yeah. People freak out. You know, my favorite kind of letter is… I say I’m in a relationship that’s not monogamous. I still love my husband, boyfriend – husband in Canada, boyfriend in America – I love him passionately. We have a great, amazing sex life that is 98% just the two of us. And I get these letters, monogamists, insisting that we don’t love each other, that we’re not committed to each other, that we couldn’t possibly love each other if we are having sex with other people.

So many of these letters end with, “And I know what I’m talking about because every one of my relationships has been monogamous.” What they’re saying then is they have started and ended and started and ended. They are serial monogamists, that when they get bored and need a little variety, they end a relationship and then move on.

I found a way to stay in my relationship and keep it happy and healthy and long haul, and I’m doing something wrong. And you, every one of your relationships has been monogamous, you’re doing it right? Because we value monogamy over commitment.